Flashcarts

Flashcarts are custom made game cartridges that allow users to put ROM dumps of games in them. This can be useful to play especially rare games on the original hardware, without having to pay for expensive collectible cartridges.

History of the Flash Cart

Flashcart is the term given to devices that can have code written to them and then be placed into a device like a SNES or a Megadrive/Genesis that uses cartridge based media and have the code that was written on them be executed by the original device. Usually a flash memory section or a flash memory card is used to hold the data: hence the name Flashcart.

There are flashcarts for all sorts of devices from very old devices such as early commodore "personal computers" through the SNES and Genesis/Megadrive right up to the N64 and GBA and DS.

Flashcarts really came into notoriety with the introduction of commercial Gameboy mono and Gameboy Color flash cartridges (flash cartridges had been around for a while before but were normally only owned by those with a fair amount of electrical knowhow that had built them themselves or paid large price for them ($400 US was not unreasonable for a megadrive/genesis cart).

These were unpopular with the big companies such as Nintendo as essentially anyone with a PC and fairly minimal computing knowledge could obtain and play ROM images of games on original hardware (emulation had been around for a while by now and was equally being attacked).

Alongside this developers which hitherto had to pay quite large sums of money for arguably worse equipment than these flash cartridges were able to equip large amounts of their staff with these flash carts for development purposes which also caused revenue streams for Nintendo and such to fall.

To this end Nintendo took legal action and managed to secure a ban on imports (which was ultimately futile) of these flash cartridges into the USA as most of the carts were manufactured and distributed out of Hong Kong and similar areas. This being said a good deal of work did take place on flash cartridges within the USA.

This situation was short lived and by the time of the new GBA this ban was no longer applicable and flash carts once more began to come about. After a few very poor initial attempts at commercial GBA carts (they were not much more than re-engineered GBC flash carts which meant the ROM images needed speed patches as well as numerous save patches and a whole host of other problems plagued them) new carts based on good designs and equipment appeared thus really starting the GBA flash cart era. There exists numerous GBA flash carts and to detail them all would make for a fairly unreadable article, the pocketheaven wiki is a good resource if you wish to know about GBA carts.

With regard to the DS flash carts exploits were discovered (see this article for more on these exploits) that allowed the DS to run DS based code from the GBA port thus enabling people with minimal extra hardware to run DS code (homebrew and roms) with their GBA flash carts. This has since become the standard method although companies have started on the DS port side of things.

Game Boy Advance

EZ-Flash

The last GBA Flashcart still in production. Uses a microSD. Since the original wiki is disused and falling apart, we have imported it's data into here.

EZ Flash V

Designed for the Nintendo DS Lite, the best way to play GBA and DS games around.

SNES

Flashcarts on SNES can be a tough and expensive proposition depending on the game you want to play, since some SNES games use special accelerator chips such as the SA-1 and the SuperFX, which can only be simulated through FPGAs.

• SD2SNES $200 - Contains an FPGA allowing you to simulate some accelerator chips with high accuracy. Of course, this makes it cost $200, but that may cost less than most of those rare cartridges.

Custom Made

If you're cheap and handy with electrical engineering, you can create your own flashcart by hacking shovelware games that have the accelerator chips you need.